“Giggled, mainly. No one’s pawed me in years.”
I ducked under the chain and held it up for her. She noticed the tread marks right way. The road climbed gently between tunneling trees, and though it had once been wide enough for broad-base trucks hauling mammoth logs, nature had since crowded in so that there was barely room for one passenger vehicle to pass. One set of tire tracks had all but obliterated the other.
A hard white glint of sunlight bouncing off metal showed through the trees as we rounded the last bend. At length we came upon Albert Gold’s brown two-door buried in the bushes at the side of the road. The tread marks said it had been pushed off the throughway. There were other marks in the sand that looked as if they had been made with a piece of bush or a broken branch, an old Indian trick to disguise footprints. Aside from a few fresh scratches the car appeared undamaged.
The door on the driver’s side was unlocked. There was nothing kicking around loose inside. The ashtray held loose change and was too clean ever to have been used for its original purpose. I opened the glove compartment. A Michigan road map, Gold’s registration and certificate of insurance, a first aid kit, a paperback spy thriller, the pages curled from reading, a plastic ice scraper with a piece broken off. And a Colt Woodsman automatic in a stiff leather holster.
I released the clip. Loaded full up. The barrel smelled of fresh oil and disuse. The poor dumb bastard hadn’t even thought to take it with him into the house. I wiped it off and put it back. Then I wiped off everything else handy and climbed out.
Ignoring Maggie’s questioning glance, I stood in the middle of the road and made a 360-degree turn to get a hinge at the scenery. From here you could just see the peak of the A-frame among the trees not four hundred yards away. To avoid footprints I returned to the grown-over apron and walked along the edge, looking down at the sandy surface. Gold had parked behind the other vehicle, which had preceded him, I didn’t know by how much. Some attempt had been made to obliterate the impressions made by the tread, but a clear piece showed just behind where the car had crossed the tracks Gold’s had made leaving the road. The diamond pattern was distinctive.
It wouldn’t have held up in court, unless some irregularity in the tread could be matched to the tires. There were probably a thousand similar sets of tires in the Detroit area alone. I had no legal reason to be standing there thinking that the design was very like that of the tires I had seen on Jack Billings’s Trans Am back at the DeLancey estate.
I
DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING
to Maggie about my suspicions. I hardly trusted them myself. On our way back down I ragged a broken branch behind us to cover the footprints we had made both ways. It wouldn’t discourage a blind Apache, but it felt good to do it.
“I suppose we should tell Hardacre about what we found,” she ventured when we were back in the car and rolling toward town.
“They’ll come across it soon enough. Cops aren’t dumb, except for their sense of humor.” I drove for a while in silence. Then: “What do you know about the last person who rented the house?”
She turned a puzzled expression on me. Then she settled back in the seat and frowned at the windshield. “It’s been so long. Months.”
“Work on it. You haven’t failed me yet.”
“I don’t think he ever came into the office and I never heard his name,” she said. “Mr. Kitchner, the owner of the house, pointed him out to me once, on the street. Medium height, I guess, around forty. No older. He wasn’t the kind whose age you could guess easily. Slim, dark hair. That’s as much as I can dredge up short of hypnosis.”
“Clothes? Complexion? What about his voice? Speech? Any accent?”
“I never heard him speak. He dressed casually, like just about everyone else around here. I don’t remember any suit or tie. Complexion?” Her brow furrowed. “Now that you mention it, he had a very deep tan and his face was very smooth. It shone, in fact. It was his only distinctive feature, and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t wintertime.”
“It sounds like he was very good at being inconspicuous.”
“Do you think he’s mixed up in this somehow?”
“I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. “It’s just one of those things you ask, like who was the last person to see the deceased alive. Most of the time it doesn’t amount to a damn. How long did he stay?”
“Not long. A week, maybe. He never came into town except to buy groceries and pick up a Detroit paper. He’d been gone a while when Kitchner died.”
“Where can I find Kitchner’s widow?”
“In town. She lives with her daughter and son-in-law. The house is right on our way; I’ll show it to you. I’d go in with you, but I’ve got an afternoon baseball game to cover. Worse luck.”
She pointed out a narrow, two-story house on a side street off the main drag and just inside the viaduct. It looked a hundred years old and probably was all of that and then some. I kept going and pulled up alongside a fire hydrant in front of the
Herald
office. Maggie gathered up her purse.
“Don’t forget your promise.”
I nodded. “Noon Wednesday.”
“That’s tomorrow.” She got out and swung the door shut. The last I saw of her she was standing in the alcove in front of the office door looking for her keys.
A pinched-looking woman with watery blue eyes and hair bleached too light for her complexion answered my knock. I gave her my card and asked to speak with Mrs. Kitchner.
“What about?” she asked, after reading the card. Her tone reeked of suspicion.
“The last man who rented Mr. Kitchner’s house in the woods. He may be involved with an investigation I’m conducting.”
“Would this have anything to do with the call we got a little while ago from the sheriff’s department?”
I said it would.
“Are you connected with the sheriff?”
I said I wasn’t.
“I’m sorry, I can’t let you speak to her. My mother had a coronary six weeks ago. Talking takes too much out of her. Besides, she wouldn’t be much help. Old age as affected her mind as well as her body. She just lays there.”
“I’d just like to ask her a couple of questions. It wouldn’t take five minutes.”
“I’m sorry. We don’t let her have any visitors.”
“None?”
“None.” She started to close the door.
“Does she have a doctor?”
The question made her pause. The door remained open just wide enough for me to see her pinched face. “Yes,” she said, as if she wasn’t sure.
“Bet his bills are hard on the family budget.”
She pressed her lips together. In small towns they still value privacy. I drew out my wallet.
“Would twenty dollars ease the blow?”
She looked at the twenty, then at me. The lines around her narrow mouth were as hard as graphite. “Your card says you’re from Detroit,” she snapped. “I’m not surprised. Maybe you can handle most folks there with money, but not here. Good-bye.” The door banged in its casing.
I stood there a moment longer, still holding the double sawbuck. Then I returned it to the wallet and slipped the wallet back inside my jacket and stepped off the porch. I paused with my hand on the Cutlass door handle, looking at the second story of the house. Heavy curtains were drawn over one of the windows. I felt empty, but not as empty as the old woman lying up there, staring at the ceiling and waiting. I got in and drove back to the city.
No one touches my engine but a sixty-two-year-old German who runs a garage on Mack. He had installed it himself at cost, after the Coup de Ville from which it had come was totaled in a four-car pile-up on Eight Mile Road. He gave me hell for not coming to him sooner with that loose rod and told me to bring it in tomorrow afternoon, once he had finished making a serviceable Lincoln out of two Continentals that had gotten smashed up in separate accidents on the same day. I rated discounts for having helped spring his nephew from a Grand Theft Auto rap two years ago. The nephew was guilty as Cain, but I needed a good mechanic. From there I headed back downtown.
There were no visitors in my office. I collapsed into the chair behind the desk and massacred the office bottle. I felt like a handful of pocket lint. When the glass came up empty a second time I put the bottle back in the drawer and called the DeLancey house. The maid informed me that Mr. Billings was still on his way to Hawaii. I asked her if he had taken his car to the airport. She said he had. I thanked her and hung up. I sat there for a moment, pushing my lower lip in and out like Nero Wolfe. It didn’t help.
The report on Janet Whiting was still in the desk. It didn’t look to have been disturbed, so maybe Fitzroy and Cranmer hadn’t tried to get a warrant after all. I paged through it absent-mindedly, without focusing on what was written there. I was thinking about what I had learned in Huron and what I hadn’t, adding them up in two separate columns and arriving with two separate zeros. A fisherman like the late Judge might have called it trolling without bait.
Suddenly I stopped paging. The bound report flipped shut of its own weight. Outside the window and three stories down, someone stood on his brakes in the middle of the street, his tires shrieking like a dog caught in a meat grinder. I barely heard it. After a long moment I lifted the receiver with a quaking hand and called Phil Montana’s office. Bill Clendenan answered.
“Is he in?”
He recognized my voice. There was a pause during which I heard “The Shadow of Your Smile” being drawn from syrupy strings in the background.
“Listen, Walker—” he began.
“I heard it. The bass fiddle needs tuning. Just tell him I’ll be around in a little while. Tell him I think I know who killed Bingo Jefferson and why. Tell him I’ve got an idea who did in Krim and that I’m pretty sure about the identity of the one responsible for a third murder he doesn’t know anything about. Tell him that.”
He didn’t answer for five or six bars. Then:
“Is that all?” His tone was icily ironic.
“Not quite,” I said. “You can also tell him I think Judge Arthur DeLancey’s still alive.”
I rung off before he could react.
A
CROWD OF ABOUT
twenty workers in caps and Windbreakers was boiling around the parking lot entrance to the RenCen, homemade picket signs thrashing above their heads,
STRIKE NOW
! screamed one in red Magic Marker letters. Another bellowed
OPEN YOUR EYES, PHIL
! and still another
STEELERS VS. STEALERS
. A handfull of sweating police officers in uniform stood on the fringes, trying to get the pickets moving in an orderly circle. The air was brittle with tension.
“Hey!”
A squat man whose jacket sleeves were rolled past muscular bronze forearms, the left a couple of shades darker than the right, inserted his hard round belly in front of the steps as I approached, blocking my path. I backed up a couple of paces and bumped into two more standing behind me.
“You going up to see Phil Montana?” demanded the first.
I took my time answering. His broad face, originally white, was burned dark and cracked at the corners of his eyes and lips. He had cigar breath. He was at least four inches shorter than I, but he had forty pounds on me easy, none of them soft. The guys behind me were my height and no less solid.
“If I told you I was, would you take to your bed and sulk?”
“One of us might end up in bed,” he grunted. “But it wouldn’t be me and the bed would be in a hospital.”
He had a United Steelhaulers patch on his Windbreaker. “I thought you union boys were all for Montana.”
“We are. Which is why we’re doing this, to get his attention. He’s been listening to the men around him too long. He don’t talk to the rank and file no more. We figure we can set him straight on how they’re selling us down the river to the big mills.”
“I get it. When no one comes up to see him he’ll come down to find out why.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“It won’t work. He’ll just send one of his stooges down here in his place. Or have the cops break it up.”
“Then there’ll be some heads busted. Right, boys?”
Assent rumbled through the crowd. One of the workers, a big black, slung his picket sign over one shoulder and hooked a thumb inside the watch pocket of his jeans, spreading his jacket to reveal the soldered end of a lead pipe sticking above the waistband.
“So I’m asking you again,” said the spokesman. “Is your business with Montana or ain’t it?”
“Hell, don’t look at me. I’m just an insurance agent. You want to buy a policy?” I produced a card from my collection, identifying me as Sherman Brady of the Midwest Confidential Life, Automobile, & Casualty Company. He made a face and stepped aside to let me pass. Like I said, you never know when they may come in handy.
This time the secretary himself was waiting for me when I stepped off the elevator. He was wearing a different tan suit, this one a shade lighter. He wasn’t smoking. The two plainclothes bodyguards loomed bigger than ever behind him.
“I told him,” Clendenan said. “He’s waiting.”
I was frisked again and showed empty. The uniformed guard didn’t look up from his desk as we passed him. “Camelot” was tootling out of the speakers above the male clerical staff, hard at work as usual. An image flashed through my mind of a world in ruins, a mushroom cloud spreading over the rubble, and one lone speaker at the top of a twisted pole, playing one empty tune after another until the electricity ran out.
Montana’s door stood open. The boss sat at his desk, fingering his World Series baseball and pretending to read the signatures on the horsehide. The desk was clear of paperwork. Blocky and solid-looking as before, he also looked tired. He had a jacket on this time and was wearing eyeglasses with half-lenses. I stood before him while Clendenan closed the door from outside.
After a while he leaned back in his swivel chair and returned the ball to its place on the shelf. Then he folded his hands across his spare middle and looked at me over the top of his glasses. He inclined his head abruptly toward the chair I had occupied during my last visit. I accepted it.